Biography contributed by Katherine Blakeley.
Sarah Brechin was born in 1869 in Lanarkshire, Scotland, the daughter of Robert Brechin, a saw miller, and Sarah Miller.
She married Robert Murray Newlands, a blacksmith, in 1892 in Linlithgow. Shortly after they emigrated to Otago on the Tainui.
They had seven children, and when Sarah signed the suffrage petition they were living in Palmerston.
Sarah died in Dunedin Hospital on July 4th 1904 shortly after the birth of their youngest child. She is buried in the Northern Cemetery.
A couple of weeks later the children were admitted to the Caversham Industrial School as their “parents were in indigent circumstances and unable to support them” and “the mother had died recently, and the father was left with a family of seven, all of whom were very young”.
Robert worked as a blacksmith and trimmer on boats travelling between England, Sydney and New Zealand.
In 1939 he was living in Liverpool. He died in 1945 and is buried in his family grave in the Linlithgow Cemetery, Scotland.